The Monarch's Way Ultra 2017 by Challenge Running - Review

Lee-Stuart Evans , Chris Yeo and Alan Cormack at the start of the Monarch’s Way Ultra 2017

Depending on the hour you ask me I’ll tell you the 625 Mile Monarch’s Way Ultra is totally do-able or completely impossible.

I came to realise recently that the 625 (ish) mile Monarch’s Way Ultra is like a mega breakfast eating challenge, it looks do-able on paper then you actually dig in and the realisation of what is actually needed hits you. If you now imagine that the Mega Breakfast Challenge has no actual plan on what food will actually be on your plate, and that others doing it may get different foods or amounts and that the chef can change his mind anytime and you can begin to understand why this race is such a bad idea.

There are many different races out there, but they all have a common theme. Races need a defined distance or a defined time in order to be a race. Without this they are an adventure or a challenge. If you are taking the time to put race numbers on runners and advertise it as a race but the route and distance isn’t clearly defined and not even recced by the Race Director….. Its not a race. Its a challenge at best, and one with no clearly defined goal.

This blog is a messy ugly story where all parties are at fault for the total lack of anything really achieved. To some extent its a confessional, but should also act as a stark warning to anyone considering this…. In my opinion this is the most dangerous race I’ve ever been involved in and it needn’t be that way. Its a story of blazing rows in car parks in the Cotswolds, sleeping on a cricket pitch and going 22 hours without seeing anyone.

Its as gonzo and rock and roll as it gets. I loved almost all of it. Maxine Lock from Challenge Running told me this would be a ‘Rocking Chair Story’. She was right.

monarch's way ultra challenge running netherton tunnel

Stalagmites inside the Netherton Tunnel on the Monarch’s Way – Pic by Lee-Stuart Evans

This blog has taken me a year to find something even close to the right ‘tone’. Something so epically bonkers exposes character flaws in us all, competitors and organisers alike. I now find I look back on this with a mixture of amusement, satisfaction and pride. Whilst the Race Director Lindley and I have a mutual but smiling disrespect for each other It’s probably bourne more out of being so similar than differences. I doubt I’ll do anything with him again, and I’m sure that will please him too 🙂

My aim of this blog is twofold. To convince 99.9999999% of readers to steer clear of this race or instead offer to help out, and to try and help the remaining 5 people reading it what they need to consider before they find themselves standing in Worcester in May.

The Monarch’s Way Guidebooks and Waymarker

The Monarch’s Way is a 625 mile (ish) trail running starting at Worcester and ending in Shoreham following the route of Charles II as he fled his defeat at the battle of Worcester and sought a ship to take him away from England to safety. The route takes in a meandering trail through the midlands , followed by some incredibly scenic scenery including The Cotwolds, Bristol, Mendips, Dorset coastline , Wiltshire Downs and South Downs.

The trail is not a national trail , it is maintained as best they can by a private charitable organisation called the Monarch’s Way Association. It is not the longest trail in the UK, It is not the longest inland trail in the UK. Its is the equivalent distance to having a beer in Guildford and then walking to Glasgow….and back.

Although the wardens and volunteers do the best they can in their allocated sections there are various parts of this trail which are in considerable disrepair, outright blocked or neglected by farmers to the point of abandonment and further complications with major discrepancies between signs on the ground, the Ordnance Survey map and the official guidebook written many years ago . The combination of this leads to some sections that are more like an obstacle course than a trail , and the two notorious loops out to Telford and Dorset coastline have sections that are nigh on impossible to fathom the correct route nor make any decent progress on as you push past, through, over or under the various electric fences, broken gates , barb wire obstructions and overgrown fields of crops in your way . It is these elements that make the Monarch’s Way much harder to complete that any other UK trail I’ve run. Anyone walking this route will see a constant battle raging between farmers aggressively taking the rights of way and an organisation working as best it can to keep it open.

In a certain fitting tribute to its King the current day route of the Monarch’s Way is evasive, confusing and deliberately difficult to follow in places.

The Monarch’s Way Route

The Monarch’s Way Ultra is a race devised by Challenge Running that started last year that to date no one has completed. Last year on its first ‘run’ all three entrants were out by day 4.

I spent 6 months preparing for this race, studying the blogs from the previous years runners and recceing over 600 miles of the route between Feb and April on almost every weekend so that I had the best chance of completing the route and not getting stuck or confused at the hundreds of navigational challenges and obstructions on the way. I tested kit, learnt how to stealth camp in a bivvy bag, marked off places I could get food and water on the trail .

I also grew a cavalier beard to go fully immersive in the ‘Roundhead Evasion’ concept.

Met by friends on day 1 of the Monarchs Way Ultra

The Race Director Lindley Chambers is very much a marmite character in the Race community and I suspect rather like me he quite enjoys that notoriety. There are many that have worked with him on JOGLE, and the gruesome Spine Race that either love or hate him. I suspect when you are out on the fringe of what is possible (and a million miles away from a park run 5k in the summer) there is no room for a lack of confidence or attempting to please everyone.

There were a number of warning signs I ignored leading up to the race. The Race website claims things are operated under Trail Running Association rules, but the Race Director hasn’t succesfully recced the route. Nor has he even visited all the proposed checkpoints. In fact every recce on the RDs blog ends in a DNF.

The second warning was the poor quality GPX files presented to us with less than a week to go before the race. A brief glance through it showed a number of errors and I raised these with the RD . I noticed that the route on the GPX files showed a crossing over the Clifton Suspension bridge (not built until two centuries after King Charles II) , I noted it bypassed major towns on the route and made the route shorter in places.

The night before the race I raised the issue of the complications of a race where the actual route is in dispute and not marked by the RD. The agreement was that in situations where the OS map, Markings on the ground, GPX files and Guidebook were in dispute and contradicted each other we were to use the Guidebook as the principle source of navigation. The guidebook was god.

Met by some of the wardens of the Monarchs Way near Redditch on the Monarchs Way

Chris and Alan and I had a dizzying array of navigation options and at many points they contradicted. We were basically being asked to run a route with a guidebook in hand, a moving OS Explorer Map, read markings on the ground and follow a GPX file from the race director. None of which quite tallied. This was impossible and it showed very quickly.

2 hours into the race the inevitable happened…… guidebook (and OS map AND signs on the ground that were all in agreement) were ignored entirely and the other 2 runners Chris and Alan entirely bypassed Droitwich following the Race Directors GPX files despite signs on the ground and the OS map and the guidebook saying otherwise.

The shortcuts started adding up and the GPS trackers on us made it starkly clear to all watching from afar online that things were not going to plan. No penalty was made or offered by the RD. Chris and Alan bypassed Stow-on-the-Wold entirely later on in the week, crossed the Avon gorge by the wrong way and traveled 38 miles the wrong way round the Boscobel Loop. The race descended into a farce by day 2.

Despite my indignant and ‘holier than though attitude’ about me being the only one following the correct route I found out nearly a year later I had actually traversed the ‘mini loop’ on the Boscobel Loop in the wrong direction. Effectively according to the race rules on the website we were all out by day 2 for failing to follow the route correctly. It was nothing short of a glorious shit show.

You can constantly return to the agreement that a Race Directors decision is final. But this level of freeform organised chaos simply undermines the RDs reputation. No recce, no clear route, no plan . The whole thing was a fortnight of winging it . That was the plan. It was bound to fail for everyone. And fail it did.

I want to add some balance here, and I will detail everything I did wrong during the race, in fact I made a number of errors that meant I was very unlikely to finish no matter what level of support I would have been given.

This race is a loss leader for the RD and Challenge running. Although the entry cost is £900 it cannot possibly come close to covering the expenses of supporting a few runners over a two week period. To add to this the one to one support from staff sounds good the reality is that it simply isn’t safe. You cannot provide 24hrs support as one person. After a few days of snatched sleep you are not in a good enough state to run things, either as a runner or organiser. We were ALL suffering from sleep depravation and a wandering hobo lifestyle. This race needs to reach out to more volunteers. . Lindley should have enough of a network to be able to lean on people to come and help . This race cannot be done safely without far more volunteers helping.

The Army would not leave anyone on a training exercise (even with a GPS tracker) for this amount of time between Checkpoints without being eyeballed.

Just because someone is moving doesn’t mean they are safe.

One of hundreds of signs on the Monarch’s Way detailing the Kings progress

My kit was fairly close to perfect for the race. I have a detailed blog here of what I use on multi day events.

I made a couple of utter ‘clanger’ errors that massively impacted my overall chances. Firstly I changed water bottles because the race rules said I had to be able to carry at least 2L . I usually use two 750ml UD bottles. The pre mix tablets I have for salt from Precision Hydration were worked out to be perfect for my 750ml bottles. I changed to having one 750ml softflask and two 650 ml softflasks to save weight and space. Then I overlooked basic maths. I was now putting the same tablet in a 650ml bottle that I used to put in a 750 ml bottle. The solution made up was therefore much more concentrated than I needed and by day 2 I had a whopping headache and all the signs of heat exhaustion from the excessive heat but couldn’t understand why. A massive bollocking from Maxine Lock in the Cotswolds made me stop taking salt at all with almost instant positive results. It wasn’t until months later I realised my maths error. I was too tired to notice the symptoms at the time.

We had a lot of rain on the first day so to protect my feet I used army MVP waterproof breathable socks. I had them tucked outside the base of my leggings to keep the lower parts of my legs dry too ( they cone up to my knees) . In short bursts of 2 to 4 hours this is fine but over an entire rain of torrential rain your feet get clammy inside the sock and worse still my choice to tuck them outside my leggings meant water was wicked into the sock from the leggings. Lindley pointed this out to me ….as he helped me with the blisters I picked up on day one.

I had issues keeping my power running on my phone. I should have invested in a separate Garmin unit for nav with replaceable AA batteries I could buy and dispose of on route. I chose to rely on Lindley getting my charger packs recharged between CPs which didn’t happen sometimes . As a result I ran low on power a lot. My power consumption was bond to be higher than the Alan and Chris, as a pair they were sharing the navigation and I was also giving regular interviews via the phone en route which is very power hungry. I had a spare phone etc for backup, but I should have given more consideration to being entirely self reliant on getting and maintaining my power needs.

Tower near the source for the Thames in the Cotswolds on the Monarch’s Way

I chose most of the time to sleep at the daily Checkpoints. This is a mistake. Lindley has no idea what time competitors are going to be at these CPs and as the days move the margin for accuracy for arrival becomes plus or minus a day rather than hours. This is a logistical nightmare for any Race Director. CP1 was cold and damp and by the canal so I got woken up a few times in the night by the engine being turned on to keep the organisers warm, I should have pushed on past CP1 and slept in the countryside near Boscobel House.

CP3 is in a layby on a main road. Sleeping in a tent in a layby on a main road is one of the funniest things I’ve ever done. Its madness. Its noisy and miserable. I should have moved into the countryside and slept

My pace on the race was much slower than my recce pace and it soon became apparent why. My recces had been done in Feb to April when the crops were low. By the time the Ultra starts in May the crops are at eyelevel for oilseed rape fields. This is a total disaster to traverse across especially when the farmers make no effort to put a trail through and leave you to push through miles of crops. One Oil Seed Field nearly broke me mentally. I was halfway through and lost the strength to keep pushing crops down to move forward on my right of way. To an observer it would have been hilarious.

Do not for a second let the overall message of this blog taint the experience in any way. There are some incredible sections on the Monarch’s Way that are well worth a visit. From passing the ‘Who put bella in the witch elm’ statue on day one, passing through the Netherton Tunnel beneath all of Birmingham and moving through Stratford Upon Avon and into the Cotswolds it utterly magical .

Lee-Stuart Evans exhausted and hot resting in the shade on the high street in the Cotswolds on the Monarch’s Way

Such extreme distances will take your body and mind to places a large number of people will have never visited. Combine that with the errors I made with excess salt , the temperatures and the large periods of time where I was entirely alone and I had every major flaw in my personality exposed. At the 200 mile mark I had a ‘situation’ with a visit from what I now refer to as ‘Ultra Satan’ where I basically had a public shouting match in Moreton on the Marsh with the RD.

This is a community endurance event, not so much a race, a blurring of runners and support. My pre ‘race’ view to glean as much info from the terrain and my recce was selfish and from a desire to ‘win’. The reality is that the chances of success are so small anyone with any glimmer of getting to Shoreham will need as much help at their fingertips as possible. I have 450 waypoints marked on my personal GPS data with info on shops , places to get water , navigational nightmares etc that I held on to for an edge.

That edge was irrelevant and in retrospect sharing this information with Alan and Chris may well have kept them in the race for longer. I know chatting briefly to Alan post race that they had many issues getting water which slowed them down, I had very few issues with water and resources because of my pre race planning. My poor sportsmanship affected someone elses possibility of achieving something amazing. I was a total wanker and still feel that way to this day even though I’m reminded that it was never my responsibility to define the route of the race….thats the organisers job, something we take for granted at all running races.

Almost every aspect of this event made me better for the future, with people and kit and the experiences gained on this paid dividends in Mongolia a year later.

Races usually involve a certain level of tactics or pacing . With this race you have only two decisions to make on 2 precious commodities. Sleep and Time. A 2 week cutoff can be gone in the blink of an eye over these distances, I felt constant daily pressure from the Checkpoint cutoffs , trying to find a balance between difficulty of the route , travelling as slowly as possible to reduce fatigue and injury , but fast enough to not be timed out. Your choices on time versus sleep will make or break the performance in the race. If I ran this again I wouldn’t sleep at all on day one, and reduce the sleep overall to probably only 2 90 min sleeps every 12 hours or so.

People came out to meet me throughout the race. Some I knew and some total strangers. Although not allowed to be with me for any significant period of time it was humbling to have so many people help, support and join the crazyness.

Kev George and Anne Inkyann came to meet me in Cirencester on the Monarch’s Way

The adventure came to an end, somewhere in a field outside Tetbury in the Cotswolds 6 days later when I woke from a decent 3 hours sleep to find the Race Director looking for me as my chances of getting to CP6 were zero. I had quite a few hours until the cut off time and my personal suspicion was the idea of me beating the Spine Race distance was just too much for Lindley to bear. He let Chris and Alan walk until they dropped and hit their emergency buttons. My last text sent and received to Lindley told him I was fine and taking a sleep and that I’d meet him in Tetbury for breakfast long before my cut off time and drop out there having done more than the Spine Race distance ( the longest distance travelled by any UK organised race).

Post race celebration from the Monarch’s Way Ultra

My last day had been a blast and I had got what I wanted …a final warm night in the Cotswolds under the stars on my own with no time pressure. It was magnificent. I went to the pub on the last day and had a pint and meal in Cirencester. I was like a kid bunking off from school. I went out laughing.

I smiled as we walked back to Lindleys car, I had traveled 245 miles in 119 hours on foot in a continuous footrace and been timed out ….but what a glorious way to fail a race. I had travelled the equivalent of Canterbury to Cardiff on my own.

I’m not entirely comfortable with the element of personal risk in this race, and that’s my standpoint and attitude to risk rather than a public criticism of the race, rules or RD …I may have simply found my personal danger limit with running…… certainly alone. Past experiences in the desert got me out of the toughest scrapes on that race, but many of my scrapes were my own doing in the first place on the Monarchs Way.

I personally found the lack of a clearly defined race route a distraction and unnecessary. Now that more of the race has accurate data (certainly the first 245 miles !) it would be sensible to see one clearly defined route for the course in the future, be it the guidebook , OS map or GPX files . To allow runners to switch between whatever suits them at the time and shortcut areas clearly marked as the Monarchs way by guidebook , OS map and signs on the ground doesn’t sit well with me. In some places I was the only runner to visit towns like Stow-on the-Wold or Droitwich. I don’t consider any of this cheating, its the natural result of a poorly defined route that requires diversions in some places, and a huge task in recceing the entire route for the RD. In retrospect it was selfish of me to not offer to take a GPS tracker with me on my recce in stages earlier in the year, my selfishness to gain an advantage pre race meant the route was chaotic for all and although gains were made in the early stages poor Chris and Alan had a shocking time later travelling far far more than necessary to follow the route in the Dorset loop . A tighter clearly defined race route with a single point of reference would avoid awkwardness in the future.

I had a lot of people messaging me during the race bemused and confused as to how I could sometimes be on a significantly different route to the other runners. My 245 miles remained as true as possible to the Monarch’s Way.

Chris Yeo and Alan Cormack had their own adventure, and I only saw them once after that start , so any conjecture about their adventures would be just that. What I will say is they both dropped at around the 425 mile mark 3 days after me and I can say with confidence that both are without a doubt the two toughest, hardiest most resilient racers I’ve ever been lucky enough to meet. I cannot stress enough how incredible their achievement was and despite endless suffering Chris managed it all with a smile. Both are to be feared in any adventure race.

visited by friends and strangers alike during the Monarch’s Way Ultra

There are probably very few people that possess the combination of mental strength, physical endurance and outdoors skills to complete this route under the conditions of The Monarchs Way Ultra. I may well not be one of them.

My biggest mistake, and one I would urge anyone stupid enough to enter this race to consider, Is that this is NOT a race. The route is not clearly defined, and anyone doing it is likely to take slightly different routes and the RD gives large amounts of leeway on the rules on his website.

This is a challenge. A quest . A personal journey. If you want to get hung up on a runner shortcutting past a whole town ‘by mistake’ then you are missing the point. Do a fastest Known Time attempt on the course instead under your own parameters.

As Lindley told me on day two after we had told each other we thought we were both wankers….. ‘worry about your own race’.

I had off the record discussions with well respected Race Directors of ultra races when I got back about the event and if it was safe and what would they do differently. In each case i always got the same answer from all of them ‘ I wouldn’t do this race’.

Lindley Chambers has stuck his neck out for this race for no financial gain. It takes the mavericks to push these limits and for many organisers and runners this is simply too far. If I’m making a case for most people to steer clear of running this I’m also making a case for people in the running community to volunteer to help make this race achievable. Help with the recce and accurate GPS files and route, recce the checkpoints for mobile phone signal and logistics, help support the runners through the organiser. Lindley is a stubborn bastard and just like me sometimes his own worst enemy as a result.
This could be the UK equivalent of the Barkley Marathons. But it isn’t there yet.

Until this event comes under the rules the Trail Running Association it claims to operate under this is nothing more than an adventure ramble into oblivion and ironically may be the only time a Cavalier attitude doesn’t suit a Charles II theme.

If a Centurion 100 mile race is the London Symphony Orchestra at The Royal Albert Hall then The Monarchs Way Ultra is a Sex Pistols gig in a pub in London. If you turn up in a tuxedo you are going to get spat on.

Depending on the hour you ask me I’ll still tell you the Monarch’s Way Ultra is totally Do-Able or completely Impossible’ ….. the difference is now I know with slightly more confidence that both are more right than I first realised.